Sleepless

I didn't watch Lost, but I ended up sleepless anyway.  My only consolation was that I found a taxi to pick me up at the unholy hour of 3 a.m., and the driver was a nice guy -- which is something to be thankful for in Manila where majority of cab drivers seemed employed by the spawn of you-know-who. 

At the airport the security had become especially overzealous.  I had to let go of my backpack, because it had my toothpaste and batteries in it, and obviously I couldn't carry these things with me in my carry-on baggage. This annoys me because I usually prefer to get up and go once I reach my destination. Then I had to take off my pumas, which caused a little tear in my haste to put them back on.  Since I didn't have socks on and forgot I had wipes with me, I could only wish that they cleaned the mat ever since they started asking people to take off their shoes. 

By the time I found my seat at the lounge, I was bleary-eyed and lightheaded with sleeplessness. Looking around, I thought that the Manila Domestic Airport had started to resemble a bus terminal.  Since PAL enjoyed the exclusivity of its own terminal (NAIA 2), the rest of the (budget) airlines were all thrown into the old domestic airport; and judging from the looks of it, mostly everybody could now fly. A good thing really -- why endure a 24-hour trip by ferry, when you can just take an hour-long plane ride at a mere additional 70% of the cost?

There were bayongs everywhere, some still in their traditional striped pattern that the Louis Vuitton line had somehow appropriated and made "classy", and some in newer cartoon-character prints.   I also saw a lot of babies, which meant that the younger generation had begun to fly much earlier than before.  Then feeling slightly paranoid I began to check out any suspicious characters and imagine other "accidents" on the plane that might cut short my trip before it even started.  I needed sleep obviously.